According to a survey by polling stations for Swedish television SVT, the current minority Social Democratic government and its parliamentary allies are on course for a three-seat majority. The poll also shows that the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) are now the country’s second largest political party, possibly taking more than 20% of the vote and overtaking the centre-right Moderates for the first time. A final result will not be known until the early hours of Monday morning, and if the race is particularly close, the final tally may not come until midweek. Small changes in voter support among the eight main parliamentary parties could still determine whether the next government is led by the left or the right. For the first time, the main center-right parties embraced cooperation with the SD, which was previously treated as an outcast. The SD emerged from Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement in the mid-1990s and is still struggling to shake off accusations of extremism. The election revealed that Sweden is a nation very sick of immigration, with the SD able to exploit fears of violent crime to shift the political debate to the right. At the height of the campaign, the SD branded a metro train decorated in its election colors as a “repatriation express”. “Welcome aboard with a one-way ticket. Next stop, Kabul,” tweeted the party’s legal representative, underscoring SD’s demand to send non-European migrants back to where they came from. Issues at the top of voters’ lists of concerns, such as rising energy prices, failing schools and long lines for health care, were drowned out by a relentless focus on immigration in a campaign cut short by war. in Ukraine and the subsequent decision of Sweden to join NATO. The election debate was also marked by gang violence. Two weeks ago, a woman and her five-year-old child were injured in crossfire in Eskilstuna, west of Stockholm. In Malmö a week earlier, a 15-year-old boy shot and killed a gang leader in a shopping mall. The number of fatal shootings rose sharply to 34 in the first half of this year, from 20 in the same period in 2021. Party leaders on the left and right vied with each other to link the rise in violent crime to large-scale immigration, which has led to high levels of segregation along national lines in the housing and labor markets. Within a few decades, Sweden has become one of the most multicultural societies in Europe, with more than a third of the population having been born abroad or having a foreign-born parent. About 30% of children do not have Swedish as their mother tongue, rising to 45% in urban areas. Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson, the acting prime minister, said Sweden should not have “Somalitowns” with a high density of ethnic minority populations, while the immigration minister suggested limiting the percentage of “non-Nordic” people. certain areas, echoing moves by the Danish Social Democrats to forcibly evict non-European immigrants from so-called ghettos. The Social Democrats have lost working-class voters to the far right, which is now the largest party among male members of the main trade union confederation. In an escalating spiral of proposals, the Moderate Party’s legal representative suggested ADHD testing for five-year-olds in immigrant areas because “in the nation’s prisons there is a high representation of people with ADHD.” The party has also lost voters from SD. Anyone living in an immigrant area had now become a problem, observed Ewa Sternberg, respected political correspondent for the liberal Dagens Nyheter: “It’s hard to believe that these parties would have tabled proposals like these 10 years ago.” Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. This was the first time that immigration and minority ethnic people had become the focus of a general election in Sweden, thanks to the growing influence of the SD, said Tobias Hübinette, a lecturer in intercultural studies at Karlstad University. “You could say that Sweden has caught up with the rest of Europe in this regard,” he said. Elsewhere in the Nordic region, anti-immigration parties such as the People’s Party of Denmark, the Progress party in Norway and the True Finns in Finland have entered into coalition relations or support with the mainstream centre-right. But in each of these his support was subsequently undermined, fragmented or even decimated by proximity to power. The problems faced by immigrants in Sweden were previously discussed in terms of shortcomings in the Swedish model, but now the immigrants themselves have become the problem, said Jonas Hinnfors, professor of politics at the University of Gothenburg. “Immigration and crime became much more important in this election campaign, partly because the reality changed, but also because the main parties felt threatened by the Sweden Democrats,” he said. “Politics has moved to areas where you’re not just tough on crime and pro-less immigration, but where you connect those two areas.”
